5th Public Lecture on the Political Economy of Transition in India

[Anthony D'Costa]

Lecture 5: November 29, D1V110 (Professor Barbara Harriss-White, Oxford University)

Capitalism and the Common Man – The Big Problem of Self-Employment In India

Abstract: India’s ‘common man’ and woman are petty commodity producers (PCP) or self-employed.  In neo-liberalizing India, PCP is the numerically commonest form of production and contributes roughly as much as the corporate sector to GDP. Reproducing by multiplication rather than accumulation, it drives growth in Indian livelihoods. This lecture will explore an eclectic micro-level literature to explore i) the internal logics of PCP (found to be varied); ii) the circuits and relations of exchange in which PCP fails to accumulate (also very varied); the state’s economic project for PCP (incoherent) and the politics of PCP (mediated, marginalised and divisive).

Barbara Harriss-White drove to India to climb mountains in 1969 and has been researching and teaching it ever since. Her work has two tracks. In one, her work developed from agricultural markets to rural-urban relations, the informal economy and long term agrarian and urban change. In the other, she examined the roles of markets and other institutions in aspects of deprivation: under- and  mal-nutrition, gender subordination, poverty, disability, education, destitution, caste discrimination and aging. Among her 20 plus books and edited volumes, a select few are India's Market Society, co-author of Rural India facing the 21st Century, India Working : Essays in Economy and Society, Outcaste from Welfare : Adult Disability in Rural South  India, and'Rural Commercial Capital And The Left Front: Food Markets in central west Bengal over the last quarter century. Having directed Queen Elizabeth House and the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme at Oxford, in retirement she is herding two sets of cats: the Wolfson College South Asia Research Cluster and an ESRC-DFID project on the materiality of India’s informal economy – with rice as the case study. 

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Anthony P. D'Costa, Professor of Indian Studies and Research Director
Asia Research Centre, Copenhagen Business School
Porcelænshavens 24B, 3.78, DK-2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark
Ph: +45 3815 2572

TRANSFORMATION AND DEVELOPMENT (INDIA AND CHINA)
http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198082286.do#.UI5Wzmc2dI0
GLOBALIZATION AND ECONOMIC NATIONALISM IN ASIA
http://tinyurl.com/9lpxma2
A NEW INDIA?
http://www.anthempress.com/pdf/9780857285041.pdf
NEW ASIAN INNOVATION DYNAMICS
http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=295354

http://uk.cbs.dk/arc
http://www.thisismodernindia.com/this_is_modern_india_about_us.html
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